Sybil 5

Sybil 5.

Sybil was, at the very least, involved in each morning’s announcements from our Sophomore year on. On many a day, there was more than just her hilarious, incessantly cheery mood that she lended to us for mental breakfast. Every morning she would include in the announcements, an anecdote from history. One day would fall on the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing on the archipelago of Bahamas. Another morning would coincide with Leif Ericson’s landing in Canada five hundred years prior. Still another date would commemorate the 1638 Treaty that legally established the genocide of the Pequot tribe. When so ever an exact day and month of an event were unknown, she would then assign a calendar square herself.

We did have a principal at Herman High School, but, at least during my tenure there, he didn’t seem quite as integral to the building’s daily operations as Sybil did. On one morning when the announcements were running late and Principal Horrigan tried to take over the mic to end the announcements as he usually did at that time in the morning, Sybil could be heard grabbing the mic back from Mr Horrigan and saying, “It’s okay Mr H., sir the students will have a much fuller education knowing that today marks the “real” invention of the airplane in France(is she serious?).